Best Cold Calling Prospects - Male or Female Callers

Did you watch The Apprentice years back? Trump once said something like "I might never hire a man again!" because the women candidates were much more tenacious.

As far as your experiment goes, you don't have a "control" so really there's no validity. What you've got is someone who's making the calls, and that's great!

I used to work in telesales and was always told I hit the top of the leaderboard because I was a female talking to males. Since I've been hiring telesales people myself I do tend to hire females. Because they are calling males predominantly.

Even when I moved into IT support, I was told that the response to me as opposed to a male would be better. Apparently, men would rather shout at another man than at a feeble little woman, if their having IT problems :confused:

But it really does depend on the type of person you are calling and it also depends on the caller.

Male or female doesn't come into it. If you are good at what you do, i.e. telemarketing, then that's all that will matter really.

seems to me the increase might be because you are actually getting the person who is making the yes decision on the phone.

the only way to test this is to find someone with the same level of phone skills as your female caller and have them call the same type of businesses.

I don't think it would really make much of a difference on your conversions though. Maybe less than 1% difference.

I think it would be smarter if you focus on getting the right person onto the phone, because that is more important and it will have a bigger impact on your conversions.

Take control of the conversation if you can't control them you can't sell them! In my many years of experience males have always had a better closing ratio. The flirting thing is not going to work in most cases it just gives them more reasons to waste your time and to stroke you! It's the numbers game as we all know!

It really does get down to experience and attitude in my opinion....and having a long term plan and being strategic.

The gender debate is relative to the situation and demographic.

There is a skill involved in listening and being able to know when to go further - or stop. Sometimes stopping enables you to take the lead and then organize another time - rather than not listening and getting someone off side and angry.

I've been out of the industry thankfully for well over 10 years. What set me apart from many (and I was top 1 or 2 in my female dominated team), was that I planned in advance.

I'd be thinking 1,2,3 even 4 campaigns in advance, so each time I came to a new campaign, many of those hard slog 'cold call no's' became warm leads for the current campaign.
In a nutshell i'd make a conenction and see 'some no's as an opportunity for a yes next time.

So my approach was two fold.
1. Get the sale
2. Plan for the next campaign and establish a database.

The result?

I'd make less calls. Take it easy while others were stressing with cold calling. Build up a database of generally 500+ (and these were people who said no to me 'then' but maybe yes to me now)

I'd established a connection/rapport with them already.

Too many operators think 'now'....if I was running one of these businesses i'd be focused on building the next campaign along the way to getting this one done.

Gets down to relationship building in my view - and theres an art to that when we are talking 'seconds' to do it.

I believe this depends on the industry that you are targeting. For example, on my experience, for IT and software male telemarketers generate more leads than female. This is because IT is often connected to men and they find it easier discuss technical concerns with them.

I was in telesales for years. Yes women do have an advantage over men when cold calling. I know we live in an equal rights society and that great but in real terms more often than not it's men you will end up pitching and men generally react better to women as subconsciously men feel less aggressive, less competative, less threatened or whatever towards them.

My female callers do outperform my male callers by an average of about 1.3X so their productivity is about 30% higher. Now that may be because of the type of campaigns they are on. But I can say that in the campaigns they are on that men are also on they produce about 30% more at least.

But like Jason said there's no way to tell THAT is the reason why.

Totally depends. I ve seen good results using both male and female callers.

The most important thing to me is the way that they talk on the phone. You can 10 different men and women.Give them the exact same script. All 10 of them will achieve different results.

It has to with their knowledge, confidence, tone of their voice etc

Dimitris